The Chocopocalypse

by Chris Callaghan

  “Indeed, how could I possibly do that?” Gari mocked, giving Mrs. Bunstable another whirl on the spinny pole, prompting a muffled “whoop” from the wide-eyed pensioner.

  “The white creepy things…,” blurted out Jelly as she thought back. “The mealy bugs. You’ve been to all the plantations in the Chocolate Belt—I’ve seen the photos. You…you spread the mealy bugs everywhere, knowing that they would kill the chocolate plants.”

  “Why would I do that? I am a descendant of the Ancient Easter Egg Islanders. I worship chocolate.”

  “Because…,” said Jelly, knowing she was right but not quite sure how to explain, “because you’re mad, because you’re evil. Because you are only interested in things like purity. Chocolate isn’t something to worship—it’s something to enjoy. You don’t understand chocolate!”

  “I don’t understand chocolate?” Gari cried out. “It’s you who doesn’t understand chocolate. You had something pure…something magnificent. Something worth worshipping. And what did you do with it?” He pointed his cane at Jelly and Gran, as if he was blaming them alone. “You filled it with bubbles. You put cookies in it. You mixed it with fruit and nuts. And Chompton was at the heart of this foulness. What were you people thinking?”

  The cane pointing continued as Garibaldi Chocolati (Choccy Cookie) bounced toward them on the cushioned flooring like a swordsman fighting an imaginary enemy.

  “You gave it soft centers, chewy centers, crunchy centers. You turned it white. You turned it pink. Pink! You decorated it. You put sprinkles on it, and swirls and piping. You wrote on it: ‘Be my Valentine’ and ‘Happy Retirement’! You treated it with disrespect. You don’t deserve it. You deserve what you are going to get—a world without chocolate. You had your chance and you failed. My ancestors knew this day was coming. They knew of human greed and the mindless disregard of purity. They foretold it. It was their prophecy.” He stopped outside the ball pit. “The professor told you!”

  “Professor Fizziwicks?” said Gran. “He’s working with you?”

  “That old fool?” laughed Gari. “For me. I paid him, gave him specific instructions and a map, and it still took him months to find those inscriptions to reveal them to the world.” He chortled. “All it took was that ‘chocolate rain,’ and he was convinced I was right!”

  “Because if a chocolate shop owner had discovered the prophecy,” said Jelly, understanding now, “then nobody would have taken any notice.”

  “Exactly, little girl,” said Garibaldi, nodding. “I needed a scientist. And he was the cheapest. It is my duty…no…it is my privilege to witness the fulfilment of my ancestors’ prophecy. So yes, I…dabbled with the chocolate crops.” He took a small sealed glass tube from his breast pocket. Inside wriggled dozens of tiny white insects.

  Jelly flinched. Yuck!

  “Mealy bugs!” he whispered, holding it up. “Just a scattering of these little crawly-creepers in the right place can do quite some damage to a delicate cacao tree.” He flicked an escaped bug off his sleeve.

  “And that march to the chocolate warehouse,” said Jelly, putting more of the pieces together. “There were bugs there too. You knew it was empty, didn’t you! You were just stirring up trouble and making things worse. You wanted more people to panic about chocolate, making it easier for you to take advantage of them.”

  “I didn’t put the bugs there.” Gari shrugged. “They are merely attracted to the cacao scent.” He swiped another mealy bug off his shoulder. “They get everywhere! But wasn’t that wonderful?” He grinned. “I saw the moment, the actual moment, when hope was replaced with bitter reality. I will treasure that moment for as long as I live. And I sold more pure chocolate in an hour than I’ve sold all year!” He spun Mrs. Bunstable around on her pole again, and she let out another stifled squeak.

  “But what now?” asked Gran. “What about that fancy shop of yours? What’s it called…Socks?”

  “Chox!” he snapped back.

  “Well, if it’s the end of chocolate, then it means no more for you either.”

  “But this is my destiny,” Gari said, opening up his arms as if he was about to sing a song in some terrible musical. “The destiny of my people. To celebrate the end of days. The end of days for impure chocolate. I will take pleasure in your misery. But until then, in the last few hours, I shall sell the chocolate I have hoarded—and I will become rich!”

  “Are you really that…that…spiteful?” Jelly whispered.

  This awful man was responsible for the end of chocolate as she knew it, and quite possibly the end of Chompton too.

  Gari twirled his mustache and smiled. “Yes…,” he hissed as he walked over to the column of switches. “Yes, I am. And I’ll show you….”

  He flicked a switch, which Jelly half expected (or hoped) would electrocute him, if it was anything like the shoddy wiring at home. But instead, a whirring mechanical sound started up, and a large trapdoor lifted slowly from the floor.

  “My chocolate bunker!” He glowered. “I have been collecting Chompton chocolate for years—and people like Mrs. Bunstable have been more than happy to steal their neighbors’ governmental disaster chocolate to help me.”

  A head suddenly popped up from the bunker. “Your phone reception down here’s a joke, Mr. Chipolata,” moaned Dodgy Dave, his phone pressed against his ear. “I’ve been trying to order a pizza for hours.”

  “It’s Mr. Chocolati,” sighed Gari, “and you can’t get takeout during a curfew, you dimwit.”

  Dave tapped the side of his nose. “Oh, I know people, Mr. Chicken-Tikka, I know people.”

  Mrs. Bunstable let out a grunt that attracted Dave’s attention, and then he noticed Jelly and Gran.

  “What’s with the Spice Girls?” Dodgy Dave asked suspiciously. “I ain’t splitting my share with no one.” He squinted through the darkness. “All right, what you doing here? Your dad could’ve had a share, though, Jell. He missed out big-time.”

  “Please ignore our…guests, Mr. Dodgy,” reassured Gari, “and be about your task. Are you nearing completion?”

  Dave half nodded. “I’ve just about loaded up the van, and I’ve prepped the GPS with our final destination. It says it’ll take fifty-five minutes.” He snorted. “I reckon thirty-five!” He waved a clipboard and retrieved a short pencil from behind his ear. “It’s all going according to plan, Mr. McSmartie.”

  “Well, get to it, my man. We have a very eager buyer ready to part with a choc-a-lot of cash!” laughed Gari. His funny accent was slipping a little, Jelly noticed. Maybe since his secret was out, the pretense wasn’t important anymore. Gari turned back to Jelly and Gran. “Tomorrow I will be gone, and the town of Chompton will be a chocolate town no more. The end is coming.”

  Stepping down into the “bunker,” he disappeared from view, unwrapping and biting into a bar of chocolate as he went.

  “You know, Mr. Dodgy,” he said, “these disaster bars aren’t too bad!”

  Gran gritted her teeth. “He always was a wrong ’un,” she said.

  Jelly nodded. “The pair of them.”

  Jelly felt a dark churning in her stomach. Were there really people as horrible as Gari in this world? She picked up one of the soft plastic balls and threw it with all her might in his direction. It bounced off the mesh and rejoined the thousands more scattered everywhere. The ball would not have done much damage to Gari, even if she could have hit him with it. But it would have been satisfying to have whopped a ball off his head through a gap in the mesh….

  A gap in the mesh!

  “Follow me,” Jelly whispered to Gran.

  “Follow you?” asked Gran, glancing around. “Follow you where?”

  Jelly dived down and disappeared below the balls, trying to ignore the smell of old, stale ball-pit plastic. And there it was—the hole she’d got through when she was little.

  She was a bit bigger now—but she squeezed and wriggled and soon popped out the other side.

  How did you do that, Houdini? mo
uthed Gran.

  Jelly pointed down. There’s a gap! she mouthed back.

  “Come on, Gran. Quick!”

  Gran knelt down among the balls. She took a deep breath.

  “Why are you holding your breath?” whispered Jelly. “It’s not water, you know!”

  Gran shrugged, and her ears went red. She took another deep breath and sank underneath the balls. Jelly watched the balls move left and then right, coming toward the mesh and then moving away.

  Gran’s head poked out at the far end of the pit, facing the wrong way. Her glasses were sitting wonkily on the end of her nose.

  What are you doing? mouthed Jelly.

  Gran muttered something in return, which may have had swearwords in it, and then swooped back under the balls. Jelly was worried Gran might get spotted, as Dave was going back and forth from the bunker, loading up his van with boxes of chocolate.

  Occasionally Jelly spotted a hand or a bum cheek appearing briefly around the ball pit. Then a foot with a furry slipper shot through the gap, almost kicking Jelly in the face. Jelly grabbed it before it vanished again. There was a muffled squeal.

  “Keep still,” whispered Jelly. “I’m trying to help.”

  Finally she caught hold of the other ankle and pulled with all her might. Gran’s nightdress and dressing gown got stuck in the tight mesh gap, revealing enormous frilly pink underwear, but after a lot of huffing and puffing, she finally popped all the way through and sat on the floor, looking like she had just used her yellow dressing gown to parachute out of an airplane. She was panting and blinking furiously, and her hair stuck up like she’d been electrocuted.

  “You’ve got really big underpants, Gran,” said Jelly, trying hard to hide a smile.

  Gran snapped up her hand. “That is not a conversation we are having!” She shoved her glasses firmly back on her nose.

  There was no time for talking, anyway. They had to get going, and quick, while Gari was busy counting his chocolate. They had to warn someone!

  Jelly helped Gran to her feet and noticed that her dressing gown was now on back to front. Turning in a circle, Gran clearly had noticed too.

  “How is that even possible?” she muttered. “I feel just like that poor man who got stuck in the bumper cars.”

  Jelly shook her head, then had an idea—actually two ideas.

  “Give me your dressing gown, Gran.”

  “Give me your dressing gown, Gran…what?”

  “Please.”

  Gran untangled the dressing gown and handed it to Jelly. “Just because we are escaping from a madman and are facing the extinction of chocolate doesn’t mean we can skimp on manners,” she said.

  Jelly took the dressing gown, and while Gran was rearranging her nightdress and underwear, she loaded it up with as many plastic balls as she could, tying it up like a bag.

  She peeked into the bunker. Gari was still counting every last piece of chocolate, while Dave was trying to hide the fact he was eating it while he was moving it. If she was going to do this, she had to do it now.

  “Wait for me by the front door,” she said to Gran. “Make sure it’s clear to escape. And watch out in case Dave comes out again.”

  “What?” asked Gran. “Where are you going?”

  “I’m going to stop him.”

  “Well, I’m not going to leave you.”

  “Gran…do you trust me?”

  “Oh, of course I trust you, dear, but…”

  Jelly looked deep into her gran’s eyes. “Please…I know what I’m doing.”

  Gran took in Jelly’s face and smiled. “It’s like looking into a mirror and seeing me when I was your age. You’re going to be everything I wanted to be, and more. You can be anything you want to be. Go on, then….”

  Crouching to avoid being seen, she hobbled along the hallway linking Barmy Bounce with Chox. Jelly couldn’t help but smile—her gran looked like a hobbit who’d just gotten out of bed.

  Jelly grabbed as many foam building blocks as she could and, with the dressing gown full of plastic balls, slowly tiptoed toward Gari…or Choccy Cookie…or whatever his name was.

  The “bunker” was the size of a large classroom and filled with metal-framed shelving. It must have held thousands and thousands of bars of chocolate before they had all been removed to be sold in some dodgy nighttime deal. Dave was holding a clipboard, making ticks against a list. And Gari was eating another bar of the chocolate he’d said he hated!

  The silence was broken by a series of groans, and Jelly turned to see that Mrs. Bunstable had managed to swivel herself around on the pole and was desperately rolling her eyes and trying to say something. Was she trying to get Jelly’s attention so she’d rescue her? Or trying to warn Gari that Jelly had escaped? Either way, Jelly had to act fast. She dumped the cushioned building blocks where she needed them and climbed. They were spongier than she thought, and Jelly wobbled on top, but it was the perfect height for her to hit the “Emergency Power Off” button.

  Which she did with a hard smack.

  Instantly, blinding lights of all colors, accompanied by a playlist of booming party tunes, illuminated the whole area. Everything jumped to life. The bumper cars, video screens, vending machines, slushy machines…and Mrs. Bunstable’s spinning-pole thing—she was whizzing around like a lost sock in a tumble dryer. Jelly almost felt sorry for her, but then she remembered their stolen chocolate. And Mrs. Bunstable had probably stolen other people’s too!

  She turned back to the bunker and looked over at Gari, whose chocolate-smothered mouth was wide open in shock. His face was bright red, and he was shouting something furiously as he ran to the bunker steps. Dave reached for his phone and frantically tapped it, probably trying to call for some dodgy backup.

  Jelly released the dressing gown. A stream of multicolored balls bounced into the bunker, closely followed by the foam building blocks.

  When Gari and Dave were covered in a sea of plastic, she kicked the doors closed and raced back to the entrance of Chox. That wouldn’t hold them for long, she knew, but surely a loud commotion during a curfew would bring the police?

  Jelly ran out onto Bittersweet Street, where she saw Gran crouching behind a small wall and waving. A few bedroom lights were already on in the street, and people were leaning out their windows. Somewhere she could hear a police siren. The booming bass and flashing light show of Barmy Bounce at this time of night made Jelly feel like an alien spacecraft had crash-landed in Chompton.

  Before joining Gran, Jelly noticed the parked white van and recognized it as Dave’s. A thought rushed into her head, and she tried the driver’s door handle, hoping it wasn’t locked. It wasn’t, so she climbed in. She was only in there, hidden from Gran’s view for a few moments, before she came back out and raced over to crouch behind the wall.

  “What did you do inside that place?” asked Gran, beaming. “It’s like Blackpool Illuminations!”

  “I saw that ‘Emergency Power Off’ button that Dad said he had fitted,” said Jelly. “And knowing that Dad gets his wiring mixed up all the time, I thought it might work as an ‘Emergency Power On’ switch.” She grinned at Gran. “I wasn’t totally sure it’d work, but I thought it was worth a try!”

  “I like your logic.” Gran nodded. “Who’d have thought that your dad being so useless would actually turn out to be useful!”

  They saw Gari bursting out of his shop. He spun around, glaring in all directions through narrow, angry eyes.

  Dave ran out behind him, holding armfuls of chocolate, which he threw into the back of his van. He closed the van door, slamming it shut, but was dropping some of the chocolate in his haste.

  Just then they were illuminated by a powerful spotlight from above. For one crazy moment Jelly wondered if it was the same aliens that some said had abducted the Ancient Easter Egg Islanders! Or maybe it was the Ancient Islanders themselves, coming to reclaim the last of the world’s remaining chocolate! Jelly was relieved (and a little embarrassed) when she realized it was
a police helicopter responding to the disturbance.

  Gari and Dave ran around aimlessly, trying to evade the spotlight. The sound of sirens merged with the pulsating beat of the kids’ playspace music. That was when Dave decided to take his position in the driver’s seat and just make a break for it.

  Two police cars screeched around the corner, their flashing lights and sirens adding to the mayhem. Gari dived into the rear of Dave’s van, and it sped off at warp factor five, leaving behind a plume of exhaust and a trail of chocolate bars.

  The first police car followed Dave’s van into the darkness, while the other came to a sliding stop. Armored police piled out of the car and began fighting over the bars of chocolate that were across the road. Jelly was sure she had never seen officers eat evidence on TV’s Police! Camera! Criminal!

  “And what were you doing in that van after you came out of that place?” asked Gran as they watched the police scurry around the ground, picking up every last piece of chocolate. “I thought for a moment you were going to drive off in it!”

  Jelly smiled. “I fiddled with the GPS a bit.”

  Gran’s eyebrows narrowed. “What do you mean, fiddled?”

  “I changed the destination zip code,” said Jelly, not sure whether she should be proud or embarrassed. “I nearly changed it to our zip code, but I wasn’t sure if that would be good.”

  “A big delivery of chocolate to the Gran-a-van would have been lovely,” joked Gran.

  “Yeah, but then I thought of the only other zip code I know….” Gran shook her head, puzzled, until Jelly revealed, “I wrote that zip code on tons of letters….It’s the one to Number Ten Downing Street!” They both tried to stop themselves from laughing out loud. “If they don’t get caught by the police on the way,” continued Jelly, “then they’ll definitely be caught when they get there.”

  Another police car hurtled into the street, so Gran gave Jelly a jerk of the head, indicating it was time for them to slink off. They were out during a curfew and didn’t want to risk being caught and locked up, however innocent they were. Gran tried her best to stop her worn-through and grubby slippers from flicking off with every step.